Chasing the Digits

For most of history, pinning down pi was brutal hand work:

• Archimedes (~250 BC) trapped pi between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7 by squeezing a circle between two many-sided polygons
• Chinese and Indian scholars later pushed it to several more decimal places, still entirely by hand
• Ramanujan found startling formulas that spit out correct digits at blazing speed
• Modern computers turned those formulas into trillions of digits

Each era used the best tool it had, and pi kept its lead the whole way.